


making it work

by Rupzydaisy



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Cannon compliant, Found Family, Gen, Nile Freeman-centric, Nile's family, Post Film
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:48:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25529953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rupzydaisy/pseuds/Rupzydaisy
Summary: "My family, they're going to grow old, and I won't. But it'll be years before they realise that. I still have time with them."Where Nile bridges her old life and her new one as best she can.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache the Scythian & Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nile Freeman
Comments: 38
Kudos: 388





	making it work

**Author's Note:**

> That scene at the car where Andy lets her go has stuck with me, along with the found family feels this film is just drowning me in. 
> 
> This is just a bit more upbeat than 'on a steady march through time' and I've just slammed my face straight into the found family trope.

She sits down with Andy and Copley, once the fighting is over and still-ish waters have returned. No one is looking for them outright, but it had taken a few weeks to clear up the whole Merrick situation. They had worked methodically and picked the security feeds clean, wiped every frame of recorded footage, and then tracked the last fragments in the trail back to the marine records held on one Nile Freeman. 

There was a tangled knot of medical notes passed back and forth between the dusty camp in the remote Afghan village where she first fell and a remote server in Germany whose lab was owned by a branch of Merrick's organisation until it died a fiery death. 

Now all that was left of its servers were a melted pool of metal and plastic, and Nile was as good as a ghost in the wind. 

"That, is-" Copley says from his perch on his desk, as he passes the last file through the shredder and they watch Nile's face turn to ribbons of paper and fall inside the clear plastic box, "The last piece of this recent excursion...gone"

"Good riddance." Andy quips grimly as she toasts to it with her coffee from her spot sunk in on the couch. Her feet are crossed over at the ankles on the top of the low table, and Copley occasionally throws her a look she blatantly ignores. "And now, we have a special request." 

"What do you need me to delete?" He grins back, reaching for his laptop. "Holiday snaps from Barcelona? A bad outfit from the sixties?"

Nile sucks in a deep breath before she asks her burning question. "Can you make it so that I can go home?"

Copley blinks back at her and the grin wavers. "What?" 

But it's Andy who stares at him with a _you heard her_ look fixed on her face as he scrabbles for his thoughts. He lets his laptop sink back to rest on his knees as his frown turns grave, and Nile can feel her hope slipping away. 

"Papers. New passport. And if we're on the topic, a medical discharge is probably going to be the easiest way to explain why I'm not there anymore." She recites the list that would take her back into the known and then waits patiently, hoping that it wouldn't be as complicated as she feared. 

The others had let her say her piece on the way over, but there hadn't been as much resistance as she'd thought there would be. They had only shared incomprehensible looks and Nicky had given a small shrug. It wasn't the voiced go-ahead she was looking for, and yet it wasn't an outright no either. She had suspected they had spoken more on the drive down, languages flicking back and forth as she had fallen asleep. 

"You're okay with this?" Copley looks back at Andy, trying to put two and two together. "After I've spent weeks deleting your faces from the face of the earth."

Andy shrugs, "It's what she wants."

"I don't understand. You're _careful_. It took me years to piece scraps of information together from across the last few centuries. What you should be worried about is how much easier that can be done today than it was yesterday, if you get what I mean."

Although Nile glances sideways across the room, waiting to hear what else she was going to say, for some reason Andy had fallen silent again. 

But the silence doesn't stop her from posing her question again. "So, you _can_ do it?"

She gains another grimace from Copley for her troubles. "It's not impossible. The papers are easy enough to forge, a digital record can be easier to edit when you don't have to fish around actual metal cabinets." 

Then he pushes off from his desk and comes around to sit on the chair opposite her, hands splayed in the air as he tries to make his point. "It's really a question of whether or not _you_ can keep your secret." 

"I want to see my family for however long I can.” When she hears the quiver in her voice, she heaves out a sigh and scrubs her hands over her forehead, hating how it feels like her world was falling out from under her. “They won't see that I'm not aging for years." 

As the two of them exchange a look, just like the others had on the cargo plane over, Nile feels the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Copley, who had spent years tracking them down on a bizarre hunch after losing his wife, and Andy, who had spent centuries roaming the earth without a family before she found someone alike. 

"Look, I happily shipped out halfway across the world to do my duty, but if I'm still alive then I want to spend my time with them. I'm not gone yet, _they're_ not gone. They don’t deserve me disappearing on them, when I’m still here."

"We know that your family’s important to you." Andy tells her quietly. 

"And I'm willing to try anything! Wouldn't you jump at the chance? Do anything to make it work?"

Copley’s answer is written across his face, but he keeps his mouth shut. Instead he looks back at Andy because they all know that she's got the final say. She leads, they follow, and it comes from her years of experience. Nile still feels the straightforwardness of their first conversation in the middle of the desert with her own blood dripping and drying on the back of her head. She knows it must sound like a slap in the face, daring to ask something that could be so risky, especially when they had only just managed to escape from the consequences of being found out. When Andy’s own hubris had ended with such disastrous results for Quynh. 

But Nile wasn't ready to walk away from her family. Not if there was a sliver of a chance. She didn't want to waste the time she still had, no matter how fleeting it would end up being in the long run.

Booker had been given a hundred years exile from the group, and it was only a fraction of the time he would have in the end. Her mom and brother would have only a small portion of that, and Nile wanted to cling to it with every ounce of her humanity.

"You know where we stand, Nile." She takes her feet off the table and shifts sideways, moving carefully because the bullet wound in her side wasn't yet fully healed. "Like he said, it's not impossible. But it’s risky."

Andy her words hang in the air, then she continues on, deadly serious, "For you and them. Because there will come a time when you'll have to say goodbye for the last time."

Nile tips her head backwards and there's a ringing in her ears, but she doesn't mind at all.

"It'll work out," she promises. I'll make it work." 

* * *

Before Booker started his exile, Nile managed to grab two spare minutes with him. 

He had spent the whole evening nursing a single glass in the bar and then moved onto drinking whatever was left in the drinks cabinet of the safe house. It had been bottles of whiskey and scotch and vodka after each other. They had left him to it, after Joe had hauled him into the second-floor bathroom and locked it as their whispered discussions at the kitchen table went on. Nile sits on the stairs, unsure of her place as his betrayal cut shallow against her compared to the others. The noises in the kitchen only pause three times as they hear him land in a heavy thump on the tiles when he passes out. 

But just before dawn, Booker knocks repeatedly on the door, asking if he was allowed out for some air. She ventures back to the kitchen doorway and volunteers to keep an eye on him, so that the others could keep talking. As she makes her way upstairs, he keeps up the noise, thumping his hand against the door until she opens it, and then silently follows her outside with his feet dragging across the floorboards. 

Outdoors, the air feels too cold in the dead of night. A shiver flicks up her spine as Nile leans over the edge of the balcony beside him. In the meagre light leaking out between the cloud cover, Booker’s hair and the scruff of his beard looks grey, possibly the closest to looking his age as he would ever come to.

"Look, you don't have to say anything to me." She tells him as his hands wrap around the crumbling wood. "Just...listen." 

He exhales loudly, but stays put, looking out at the silver lined waves in the river. 

"I want to believe that you weren't lying the whole time-"

"I wasn't." He croaks out immediately, although he still doesn't look back at her. 

"Because I can only talk to four people about this, about what all of this is like, but Andy's not going to be around forever." Nile swallows thickly, feeling the undetermined point in time blink at her from far off on the horizon. She hates the idea of losing someone who had become so important to her, so soon. "Joe and Nicky and you will be all I have to figure this out." 

"They're good." Booker sighs again, rolling out his shoulders. "They'll be there for you."

" _You_ had them at the start. You've done this, and you know how it goes." 

Nile turns her head back to face him, but he’s still looking out at the silver moonlight on the water with a hundred-yard stare, or maybe it was a hundred years. She can't even begin to imagine what he's feeling. But they had managed to work things out with Copley in a way that didn't involve him being buried ten feet deep somewhere in the woods around his home, and that makes her feel like there's a way through this betrayal. 

After all, with all the time in the world, things like anger and grief could eventually melt away no matter how strong the emotion. 

It was like Andy had told her, _it's what time leaves behind._

They stand there like two shadows instead of people and it feels more tiring than all the fighting she's done, or the penthouse-storey drop that she quite literally walked off. 

"Whatever they decide as punishment for you, I've got something I wanted to ask." 

Booker turns back to her, still somehow managing to look past her. "It's whiskey over vodka, and steer clear of the absinthe." 

The flippancy in his voice forces Nile to stifle a groan. Because that's one thing that keeps throwing her off balance; how casual they can be about _all_ of it. One moment her hands are on the balcony and the next they’re shoving at him, until he does lift his head up to meet her eyes. "No, I've decided that you owe me, and I think you know that too." 

"You want money?" 

"No." She shoves a hand into her jacket pocket and pulls out a new burner phone. "I want you to take this."

Nile pushes it into his side until his hand clamps over it. "And when I call with questions, I want you to _answer_."

He doesn't move for minutes, stunned back into silence in the same way he had been when Andy was telling him to get up from the lab bed. The clouds track over the sky and the water rushes back and forth lazily as it builds up to high tide against the Thames’ banks. 

She stands there, refusing to move until Booker pushes the phone into his own jacket pocket and finally nods. 

"Okay, alright. I can do that." 

* * *

Nile returns home to the South Side. She slots her key into the door and the hinges creak a little as it swings open. 

Her heart breaks as soon as she steps through and she staggers, but it’s not from the weight of her backpack or the long-winded journey with multiple connections which it took to get home. And it doesn’t matter one bit because suddenly there's arms around her holding her up as she sobs like she’s a child again. 

"Nile? Nile!" Her mom's hands are warm across her back and on the sides of her face, chasing her tears away. “You’re home. You’re home now, baby.” 

There's no balloons or banners to welcome her back and she had arrived too late into the evening to have dinner but Nile doesn't care about anything apart from drinking in the sight of her mother's face or the feel of her hands leading her into their home. The weekend passes less awkwardly than she had imagined, but she alternately feels like a child wishing to hide from the world and Atlas himself, weighed down with her secret as if it could set a visible curve to her shoulders from the half-truths she manages to set loose from her tongue. 

It also doesn’t change the way her stomach drops as her mom sits her down after breakfast and holds her hands inside hers. “Whatever’s happened for you to leave, you know there’s a way back from it.”

“I know, mom.” 

Nile looks down to see the lines on her hands and the odd burns from cooking, and swallows hard. Her own hands are unblemished again. She heals even quicker now, just a few moments of quiet and dark and then she’s thrown back into a sea of pain that fades by the time she’s back on her feet. In those seconds of agony, all she can do is focus on breathing. But she’s never alone when she falls. There’s either Andy, Joe, or Nicky close by, or Copley down the wire in her ear, calling her back. And sometimes it’s her family. Their faces come to her and they bring her back from the darkness, push the pain away with every thumping heartbeat.

“So you know, you can tell me anything.” Her mom gives her hands a tight squeeze, and it’s like the air has been sucked out of her lungs. 

They sit together in silence, and eventually Nile manages to meet her mom’s eyes, and the concern in them is enough to want to tell her _everything_. Instead she bites the inside of her cheek and then finally says, “Mom, I just want you to know that things have worked out. It might not be like I imagined.” 

Nile’s lips break into a smile, and she adds, “But it doesn’t mean it’s not good. It is.”

Her mom smiles back, but the frown on her face hadn’t yet smoothed away. “I just worry, baby.”

“I’m going to help where I can. And I’m going to always, _always_ do my best to make you and dad proud.”

“You already do, Nile.” 

“I promise, mom.” 

* * *

Nile keeps her eyes shut in the darkness and her hand reaches out for her phone on the side table. The sheets are damp, not from seawater but from her own sweat and she shifts underneath them until she’s kicked them away. It’s one long button press as she hits the speed dial. 

She exhales slowly each time the tone rings in her ear, replacing the sound of muffled nothingness. After a minute, the call gets picked up. “Hello?” 

“Nile?” 

“I keep seeing her, Quynh.” 

"Yeah, it doesn't go away." He sounds more tired than she feels, and the word _exile_ scrapes at the far end of her thoughts despite it being such an old-fashioned word. It’s been weeks since the team parted from him. Yet his absence was still felt; when Andy made a glib comment and expected it to bounce off another person for a laugh, or when Nicky picked up one too many glasses when setting the dinner table. 

Nile nods, and slowly opens her eyes to see the faint outline of the thin hotel curtains drawn over the window. She sits up slowly and drags the pillow up behind her shoulders, wishing the light switch was in reach so that it could banish away the imprints of the other immortal’s cycle of dying and reviving under the crushing weight of thousands of tons of cold water. 

"Because we haven't met her."

"Because we'll never meet her." Booker coughs and then she can hear his footsteps along with some more rustling down the line. A door slams shut and the wind whistles between his words, “I see the same thing, over and over. Every time I sleep. Like a haunting. Either it’s her...or it’s...”

He trails off and she leaves it unaddressed, not knowing what else to say. 

"So..where are you?" Nile asks, breaking the silence again. 

"Iceland." 

"Oh yeah, what's that like?"

"Cold. Windy.” He hesitates and then asks, “How's everyone?"

Nile can’t help but smile to herself in the dark. "Andy's in the Bahamas. Apparently she hasn’t been back properly for a vacation since the eighteen hundreds. Joe and Nicky are in Tripoli." 

"And you?" 

"I'm on my way there too to join them. My flight takes off soon. I’m in a really shitty hotel about thirty miles out from the airstrip. Copley knows how to pick them."

She earns a harsh snort out of him for that. 

“Who are you flying with?"

"Some rebel gun runners."

"And how's that sitting with you?" She thinks she can hear a smile in his voice, and realises Andy must have said something _before_. 

Nile tips her head back and slumps further down against the pillow. "It could be worse, I guess."

"There's a certain kind of…. flexibility that comes along. It’s like you're a boulder in the middle of a river. No wait, that's not right, more like the rocks at the edge of a waterfall. You can see it all, before and after. But you're also there on the edge, as a constant."

"I... don’t get it"

"You can choose how deep into the water you go. Andy has been around so long, at times she couldn't see the shore. Joe and Nicky are different, they have each other and in that way they'll always know where they are."

She frowns, lost in the imagery, disliking how she thinks she can hear water rippling at the edges of her sleepiness. But there’s curiosity too. "You?"

"Me?" Booker coughs awkwardly down the line. "I don't-"

The line goes dead for a moment, and then the sound returns in a burst of crackle. "I've been lost too. You forget, or you start to question what it matters."

Nile leans forwards, and her voice is firm once again with any remnants of sleep pushed away. "I've seen it, on Copley’s wall, from your stories. You've done good too Booker."

"A decade here, a century there...and all the while the world continues to go to shit."

"Doesn't mean you should forget what you did, or why you did it. You might have lost faith, and hope, but it’ll come back. You'll find it. I know you will."

She hangs up after he gives a quiet goodbye, and climbs out of bed feeling more determined than she had over the past few days. It was easy to put it down to naivety or a blinkered perspective, but time could wear down everything, even Booker's grief, and allow something else to form in its place. A hundred years would pass, the exile would come to an end, and he'd rejoin the team in time. She was certain he would. 

* * *

Nile wakes up in her own bed on her birthday to her family trying to sneak into her room. She hears them sneaking up the stairs, floorboards creaking. Her brother was trying to go as slowly as possible. They had even paused outside her bedroom door, her mom whispering low, and then she hears the strike of a match. 

He stubs his toe on the bed frame and she can hear her mom huff out a laugh, knowing she’s probably even rolling her eyes, even though Nile’s still got hers shut. 

It makes her smile, under the duvet covers. 

"Happy birthday, Nile!" Her brother calls out cheerily as she sits up slowly, pretending that she's only just woken up. 

"Hey you guys. Wait, is that cake?"

"Happy birthday, baby." Her mom's smile lights up the room and Nile wishes she could take a picture of them, to keep the little golden tinged image forever. Instead, she smiles back and leans forward to blow out the candle on her chocolate cupcake. 

Later that morning they sit at the kitchen table and her mom bustles back and forth to cook up her favourite foods. It’s a comfortable situation and one that makes her forget the outside world, and everything else about her life, just for a little while. 

Her brother leans forward to sling his arm over the back of her chair and stage whispers to her, "I'm glad you managed to come back for today, she misses you when you're off doing whatever security work you do now."

"I'm glad too." She sees the crinkles around his eyes and mouth deepen, knowing she wears a matching one. 

"I'm just wishing one day you'll get leave for longer than a weekend." Her mom drops a hand on her shoulder as she reaches across for another spoon. "I'm not complaining, by the way, I'm just saying." 

Nile smile wavers, just for a second, and then she sets about making the few hours she has left with them on this visit as memorable as possible. They feel less and less like stolen moments, but it doesn’t change how precious they are to her.

* * *

The seasons change and she bounds across the world. Sometimes it’s with the whole team, other times she’s with Andy, or alone. She places her bets on silly things against Nicky, Andy, and Joe, and sometimes she wins. 

Nile travels to fight and to explore, the world opens up in front of her. Instead of it being a rush to see as much as she can in one short lifetime, it becomes the choice of seeing something now or _later._

Certain things begin to fall away. Certain fears become irrelevant, and she feels bolder, braver, and more herself. 

She dies more times than she can count, and maybe it’s just the nature of the game or maybe it’s her own quick willingness to step in front of Andy despite the bulletproof vest and helmet, or the feeling of invincibility that puts extra speed in her steps as she charges into another risky but effective move. 

Inevitable, she finds herself setting up her first safe house. 

It's a little bare and she's gone ahead and moved all the belongings she doesn’t cart around the world into the living room. There's a double framed photo showing her mother and brother on one side and her father on the other. It stands proud on the coffee table by the wall. On a shelf above the couch sits a sketchbook that Joe gave to her, with its pages inked and pencilled with dozens and dozens of images, On the floor is a haphazard pile of language books with her notes and a fistful of highlighters. The second sofa has a much more neater stack of first edition books thankfully in English that had been left in Andy's cave with a post it note saying _read me,_ which Booker had half-alluded to in his last phone call. 

Aside from a new flatscreen tv, a handful of plates and cutlery, and a fold out bed, it's the corkboard on the wall that’s the only item in the room that makes it seem remotely lived in, rather than almost emptied. 

There's a postcard from Harare with Nicky's neat cursive and a small patchwork of Polaroid pictures that Nile had flapped dry in the air herself while waiting for the ink to dry. They include one where she had caught Andy on camera looking straight at the lens with a smile. It was no Rodin sculpture but the little smirk of approval the old warrior had given her made it seem appreciated. 

She knows Booker’s face would be added to the wall in time. 

Nile can understand why Andy kept the cave at the bottom of the mine. After centuries, there wouldn't be much hope in returning to a neighbourhood and trying to find the right block or the hassle of arguing with a landlord about rents or contracts. Things would change too much while she’d stay the same. Places by the sea would be washed away by the rising tide, and estates knocked down to be redeveloped. 

One day, not so far down the line, her small safe house would be filled with mementos. 

And one day sometime after that, Nile knew she'd move her most precious belongings onto the next place, to a cave of her own. 

* * *

"Mom, I'm home." Nile calls as she opens the front door and steps into the hallway. 

"Nile!" Her mom calls back over the side of the bannister, and then makes her way down the stairs as quick as her feet can take her. "You're back!"

"Yeah, I am." She hugs her tight, and whatever stress she had carried home with her to the doorstep is chased away. Then she pulls away slowly, looking sheepish for once. "Mom, I've brought some friends along with me. From work, it’s just a passing visit. We'll be gone before breakfast."

With her hands still on Nile’s shoulders, she steps back to take a look at the other three figures on her porch. "We? You should have given me some warning. You're lucky your brother's gone on a road trip with his friends or there wouldn't have been any room here at all...he's going to feel pretty unlucky since he's not here to see you."

But there's no admonishment in the words, and it makes Nile smile wider as she makes the introductions. "I'll give him a call later. Mom...this is Nicky, Joe, and Andy."

She had been a little worried about bringing them home, and even they had been wary of stepping too close to her family life, but she hadn’t been wrong. They pile into the house, falling into place as her mom tells them to make themselves home. Nile sees it’s not just in the way Joe takes over the washing up after dinner, or how Nicky cajoles her mom into singing along to radio as she’s made to sit and relax, but also how her mom keeps smiling across at them, like she’s seeing how her daughter fits into the world beyond her home. 

Her mom drops a kiss on her cheek and heads upstairs to bed early while they stay in the living room with the TV on mute. A rerun of a baseball game from earlier on flicks across the screen and Nile lounges on her father's armchair, her head and feet resting on opposite armrests. 

Andy's beside her on the floor tucking into her second helping of chocolate ice cream, even though her mom had told her that she'd catch a cold from the draft coming in through the door behind her. Opposite, Joe and Nicky were slumped together on the bigger sofa, trying to keep track of the game with the sound down low as they fought off their yawns.

When they do fall asleep, Andy shuffles closer to her, elbowing at her shin, and whispers, "Sickeningly domestic."

"Speak for yourself." Nile whispers back as she smooths down the blanket her mom had draped over Andy's bare shoulders before heading upstairs while muttering about wearing a tank top in late autumn. 

"I wasn't sure about this. But somehow, it's worked." 

Even though she knows what Andy means, Nile can’t help but crack a joke. "This street's quiet. And my mom's hardly going to Instagram my visit." 

It had been easy to explain to her family that she had found a job with a private security company that helped out in conflict situations. It also made it easy to explain that she needed a light digital footprint whenever she was at home, as a standard requirement of her contract. 

"True." Andy laughs, spooning the last dollop of ice cream into her mouth. "Think I could get some more?"

"Sure." 

Nile slings her feet over the side of the armchair and pads over to the freezer to get the tub and then picks up a spoon from the drying rack as Andy flips the channels over as Nicky's soft snores punctuate the hushed cheering. As she passes back with the container in hand, she sees Joe unconsciously reaching for the blanket on the back of the couch and pushes it closer to him.

Nile slides down to sit on the floor beside her. "We might as well finish it off. She only buys it for my brother and he's not back until Thanksgiving."

"If you insist." Andy digs the spoon straight in with a satisfied groan. "Beats eating beans out of a tinned can. Or energy bars."

There’s a companionable silence in the room. It makes Nile smile again, happily sinking deep into the feeling of comfort from being in her home. 

Nothing lasts forever, but her memories of it would be as immortal as she had become.


End file.
